Alexander William Morales’s (2021) shoe in this review was once on the other foot, mine. As an early-career scholar I wrote a review of Alan G. Gross’s groundbreaking (1990) The Rhetoric of Science. Gross responded with extraordinary grace, which, very… Read More ›
Science and all that it represents stands at the center of our civilization. There is an increasing interest, both within and without the academy, in the rhetoric of science, and I believe, despite the irony implicit in the request, that… Read More ›
Gothenburg, Sweden, May through July 2020—An Introduction of Sorts[1]. Ever since the ‘birth of politics’ in ancient Greece, where philosophers and rhetoricians competed to educate the young, the importance of the social imaginary for the founding of cities and creating… Read More ›
We enter this conversation precisely to continue this productive exchange on the lessons to be learned from L’Aquila, grounding our response to both DeVasto and Felbacher-Escamilla on our previous work about the same case published in 2019 in Rhetoric &… Read More ›
In “A Rational Reconstruction of the L’Aquila Case: How Non-denial Turns into Acceptance,” Christian J. Feldbacher-Escamilla (2019) revisits the L’Aquila earthquake controversy, linking public dismissal of seismic risk to scientists’ failure to explicitly reject politicians’ misstatements. This analysis stems from… Read More ›
The intimate relationship between expertise and ethos is mediated by rhetoric. Complex articulations of these social, political, and rhetorical relationships are found in Reddit’s r/science Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) series that allows a scientific expert to engage in an online question-and-answer period… Read More ›
An argument without an audience is pointless, and an argument without an arguer is no more than a potential set of sentences. In his response to my earlier paper (Hinton 2019) on the ability of argumentation theory to deal with… Read More ›
Martin Hinton in “Why the Fence Is the Seat of Reason When Experts Disagree” (2019) discusses the use of the theory of argument schemes and their associated critical questions in the situation when experts disagree about a certain matter. In… Read More ›
Author Information: Alan Sokal, New York University, sokal@nyu.edu. Sokal, Alan. “A Dialogue on a Paradigm Case of Bad Science: Comment on Brian Martin.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 8, no. 5 (2019): 36-47. The pdf of the article gives… Read More ›
Author Information: Bernard Wills, Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador. bwills@grenfell.mun.ca. Wills, Bernard. “Notes on the Rhetoric of Trolling.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 8, no. 5 (2019): 1-10. The pdf of the article gives specific page references. Due… Read More ›